The story of a conversation between an American and a Ukrainian amidst the drones.

Rhododendron flowers in Carpathian National Nature Park, Ukraine. (Courtesy Misha Rene, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)

If you have ever wished there was something you could do to aid Ukrainians during the war, my experience as an online conversation partner with ENGin might be of interest.

“ENGin is a global nonprofit [launched in early 2020] that helps Ukrainians of all ages improve their lives through authentic English-language conversation with volunteers worldwide,” the “woman-led, majority Ukrainian” organization says. “Our innovative program has connected over 65,000 Ukrainians and fluent English speakers for mutually beneficial relationships at the intersection of language practice, cultural exchange, mentorship, and friendship.” Conversations are one hour per week on a Zoom-like platform. ENGin says all participants are screened, given some training and resources, and matched “based on preferences and availability.”

As I was being vetted, administrators asked what I would do if my Ukrainian partner wanted to talk about hardships and loss. I said I could listen. What else could I do? I am not a therapist and have no influence on the American government’s decisions regarding Ukraine. (The Council on Foreign Relations says, “Since Trump assumed office in January 2025, there has been no legislation or other authorizations of significant new aid to Ukraine.”) The program’s polling says “76% of students experience a decrease in stress” from emotional support given by ENGin volunteers.

I applied for a subset of the program—educators talking with other educators—but the main program is for nearly anyone. Participants in the subset are meant to discuss educational topics for several weeks before opening it fully to other things, so I wanted my assigned partner to know I had only ever taught in college English departments.

Nadiya (a pseudonym) replied by email, “Please don’t be nervous about the pedagogy part! I have some news that might make you feel more comfortable: I am an English teacher at a public school, and I specifically work with primary school students. Since I teach young learners, my daily work is…all about games, songs, and basic grammar. My speaking skills leave much to be desired and it’s rather difficult for me to speak fluently. […] My main goal for our meetings is to practice my speaking skills and maintain a good level of English, as I mostly use ‘classroom English’ at work.”

Nadiya and her family live in a mid-sized city in eastern Ukraine, scant miles from Russia. She and her husband have a 10-year-old son who likes Legos, and a five-year-old Yorkie named Timmy. They enjoy gardening at their dacha, family walks, and board games. Nadiya got her degree, I believe, in what I am told is an excellent program in Lviv, at a university founded in 1661. (I asked her if the English curriculum there is British- or American-based; it is British, she said.)

Our mutual education—the true purpose of any international program—quickly commenced, and I began to see the complexities of the situation. Nadiya’s irritation with Ukrainian media, for instance, stemmed from it emphasizing successes against the Russians, when her city knew differently.

Nadiya, who turned 34 during our time working together, is friendly and polite. She did not actually need my help for conversational English; she is more fluent than President Zelensky, and her accent is less discernible than that of our own (Slovenian) First Lady. Because of this, and because she asked a bit sharply more than once why I had volunteered, I will admit that I wondered briefly if the program was state-sponsored propaganda (“Helping Ukraine Speak to the World,” says its website) or, for that matter, a Russian operation, since Nadiya was often critical of Zelensky, his government’s defense of the country, and the Ukrainian media but not of, say, Trump’s attempted humiliation of Zelensky or his well-known admiration for Putin.

But our mutual education—the true purpose of any international program—quickly commenced, and I began to see the complexities of the situation. Nadiya’s irritation with Ukrainian media, for instance, stemmed from it emphasizing successes against the Russians, when her city knew differently. A large community building near her apartment had been bombed recently by drone, and the resources to fix it were in short supply. Ukrainian air defenses were used to protect the biggest cities, she said, while drones harassed smaller cities and villages in the countryside around the clock. This had escalated since the start of the war, and recently they had been hit by 35 drones in a single night. The concentration of resources on big cities was understandable in a sense, she said…still. Exhausted, she had little interest in American politics.

Nadiya’s father was Russian, and she still has Russian relatives, who think Ukrainians are making too much of the “special military operation,” she said. Her dad was a welder and worked often in Russia; his work “is still present in the Russian society,” she said. She was very close to him and to her mother’s father, a builder. She misses them still to the point of tears and goes to talk to them in a graveyard in a nearby village. In their day, of course, this was all the Soviet Union, and she herself came up through school speaking Russian and worked, as a teen, as a camp counselor in Crimea for kids from Moscow, where she said she was perpetually anxious about their health and safety.

But Nadiya is a Ukrainian patriot and fiercely loves her country, which should be free of Russian occupiers and influence, she said. She said she could not imagine living anywhere in the world but her home. It upset her to speak to me about the great crime of Russians taking thousands of Ukrainian children for “re-education.”

Our weekly sessions were before noon for me and in the evening for her. I tried to keep them strictly to the designated hour, because when we had finished, she read and prayed with her son for his bedtime. We always started with pleasantries—how are you, is your family well, how is the weather, has the river broken up yet in the spring thaw?—followed by her news of the war, my questions, then discussions of everyday topics. Several times Nadiya made PowerPoint slideshows to explain to me their holidays, culture, and region, and in that abrupt-sounding Slavic way would say, “You will look here now,” as she kindly and generously told me about her life.

Often we talked about food and cooking, a shared interest. My total ignorance of her language, and her not-quite-total American English vocabulary did not get in the way. I asked if her family grew blueberries at their dacha. She said the bushes would not grow there because of—she could not remember “acidic soil”—the “sour earth,” a good improvisation. I said I was trying to make a blueberry pie with frozen blueberries but had concerns that the freezing had ruptured the fruit’s cells and would make the pie watery. I got caught in one of my intentional language loops and could not speak simply. She wanted to know if I planned to thicken the filling somehow; I bobbled my explanation of problems using cornstarch, and she did not know the word “jelly”; we settled in the moment on the word “confiture.” So it went, with talks about borscht, cheese, “church basement” food in the Midwest, and that joke about mayonnaise being too spicy for some.

Our weekly sessions were before noon for me and in the evening for her. I tried to keep them strictly to the designated hour, because when we had finished, she read and prayed with her son for his bedtime.

As Easter approached (on different dates for us, with some confusion over the word Orthodox in English), we talked about the pleasures of food and rituals. Nadiya said their Easter baskets contain delicious cheeses, bread, sausages, and a candle, and were always blessed at services, at least before the war. Eggs are decorated in that remarkable Ukrainian way. Every household makes paska, she said, a braided or tall bread with dough similar to hot cross buns’, and varenyky, dumplings. Tellingly, this year, she told me in a session, she had bought their paskas, because there was often no electricity at home except from a bank of batteries that lasted a day if conserved. Her son was home from school, and they were being droned every day and night. She said she did not hear a drone at that moment, but the phone alert app was showing one nearby.

Easter was one of the greatest holidays for her, she said, recalling when her dad and granddad were alive and there was no war. People would always go to the graveyard to visit relatives a few days after Easter. Now widows and children visited their “defenders” in the graveyard, as well as other kin. She shared her screen to show me a photo of a graveyard in a nearby village, filled with war dead and flags.

When we spoke in the middle of April, Russians had droned a car park, a sawmill, and a furniture company. Before 2025, drone attacks had occurred only about four times a year in her city, she said, but Putin had delivered a speech in Sochi, Russia, in October, and Ukrainian drones had hit that city, enraging him. The Russian army attacked everything now, day and night. There had been 10 explosions the night before. Apartments were destroyed; a woman had just died.

“I think they make experiments,” Nadiya said. Ukrainians had proved batteries and other measures survived the attacks on power stations, so Russians had stopped bombing those as much. Sometimes drones were spotted but they did not strike, as if to keep everyone afraid.

Workers used to take trains several hours each day to Kyiv and back for work. These were no longer safe. Buses were used instead, but it was not safe to wait in the open at bus stops, so people waited inside the tree lines of forests, in the cold, with their children. Kids being treated for cancer, and their families, were droned at the hospital. Nadiya said maybe the Russians thought wounded Ukrainian soldiers were being treated there. (Both bombings are war crimes.)

She changed the subject. “So look here, this is a national clothing called vyshyvanka, our traditional shirt,” she said, showing me the beautifully embroidered clothing. “May 3 is Vyshyvanka Day, Ukrainians all over the world wear them then.”

At some point I was curious about finances, and Nadiya waded in. They pay 6,000 Ukrainian hryvnia (UAH) for an apartment each month, about $135. She makes a little more than twice that as a teacher. For comparison, she said, welfare payments are 3,000 UAH. They have no problem getting food, medicine, or clothing in their city, she wanted me to know.

What may be the last vestiges of my teaching brain thought that maybe talking about places we have known, plus our formal education, plus the cultural understandings we choose to live in, plus our people and how we love them, equates to something about who we are.

I joked with her about English-language idioms and the struggle of an older dad to keep up with the words of American 20-year-olds, such as drip, fit, bet, rizz, no cap, not gonna lie. I told her I had teased my sons, when they were little, by using phrases long dead before I came along, such as hep to the jive, cool cat, and daddy-o.

I explained aspects of the Midwest. (It felt grotesque to tell her about recent trips I had been fortunate enough to take.) I showed her photos of my parents when they were young and told her how I came to be born in Saigon as a result of their jobs later in life. What may be the last vestiges of my teaching brain thought that maybe talking about places we have known, plus our formal education, plus the cultural understandings we choose to live in, plus our people and how we love them, equates to something about who we are.

Nadiya married the love of her life. Her husband is an agricultural specialist who, before the war, took a job on a large farm in a Nordic country for several years, which helped the family financially and paid for a new car. She spoke of the tension in their marriage due to her having to raise their son by herself, but also how her husband worked so hard on the farm that he came back almost unrecognizably skinny. Neither understood the other anymore. They had vacationed in the Carpathian Mountains on their last holiday. The photos were pretty and peaceful. Nadiya’s husband and her mother, who is in her 70s, now work in factories that supply the military. She worries constantly for her young son, who had a difficult birth and now lives in a difficult and dangerous time.

Meanwhile, she said, the kids of government officials have moved abroad during the war and are “living their best life.” She had to admit that, although it made her angry that people in Kyiv drank coffee in sidewalk cafes while in the provinces they had economic hardship and were getting droned, she was drinking coffee when Crimea and Donetsk were attacked and overrun.

I listened and asked questions every week; what more could I do? I stressed my moral support and frustration with my own government.

“Slava Ukraini,” I said.

“Thank you so much,” Nadiya said.

At the end of April, she emailed:

Hi John,

I am writing to tell you that I cannot attend our meeting today.

[S]ome drones have hit an important power station today. Now we have no electricity and the internet is not stable.

I am very sorry for this trouble, but we need to cancel our meeting today.

Best regards,

—Nadiya

In the next scheduled meeting, at the start of May, Nadiya was cheerful and apologetic. The Russians had hit not only the power grid but also a gas station that went up spectacularly, more apartments, and a hospital. When first responders showed up, they got droned too.

She talked with some pride about how the Russians had thought at the start of their invasion that they would take Kyiv in three days. They brought dress uniforms with them for the victory parade. I said some observers in the States had thought the Russian column trying to enter Kyiv in February 2022 might have become another Highway of Death. She knew all about those hopes. She said the Buryats, an indigenous people of a region in Russia’s Far East, used in the Russian invasion, had stolen all the Ukrainian cows and horses they could take with them when they fled, and their battle tanks were filled with pillaged Ukrainian toilets.

I asked if she knew the Budapest Memorandum by name, by which Ukraine agreed in 1994 to give up their aging Soviet nuclear weapons in return for security assurances and reprocessed fuel rods for electrical generation. Yes, she said, Ukrainians were very angry at not being a nuclear state now, which had made the Russian invasion possible, all because of their old government, Boris Yeltsin, and Bill Clinton.

A few days later in May, Vladimir Putin asked Ukraine for a three-day truce, which was brokered by Donald Trump, so that Russia’s Victory Day parade could take place without interruption. Nadiya came to our meeting saying that she had finally been able to rest a bit from her exhaustion, and their son was even able to walk outside with his friends. (Two days later, Ukraine said, “1,410 Russian drones and 56 missiles [were] launched at Ukrainian cities and communities in just one 24-hour period from 13-14 May.” Twenty-four people were killed.)

A thousand prisoners on each side were also meant to be exchanged during the truce. Nadiya showed me photos of some of the 205 Ukrainians released to that point. They were emaciated, and some had misshapen limbs from improperly set bones broken by their captors.

On May 19, nine minutes into our session, Nadiya was speaking on camera from her son’s bedroom, where he had a poster on the wall of an American car in fire-engine red, when a flash illuminated the side of her face and the room.

When she closed the slideshow, she surprised me by suddenly exclaiming she was ready for Ukraine to give up Donbas and Crimea to Russia, that people are more important, and she said Ukrainians all agreed on that. At her school a plaque had been installed for one of her own classmates, killed in the war. When I asked she said she had July and August off work, but her family would not spend the summer as usual at their dacha with its extensive garden. The risk was too high; they would only go there on weekends.

Then, on May 19, nine minutes into our session, Nadiya was speaking on camera from her son’s bedroom, where he had a poster on the wall of an American car in fire-engine red, when a flash illuminated the side of her face and the room. She turned to the window as the noise of the explosion shook her building. She glanced at her app, which showed another drone still in flight. We said goodbye quickly so she could grab her son and take shelter.

I waited a couple of days and sent Nadiya an email to ask if they were okay. What else could I do? There was no answer, but ENGin warns that Ukrainians are not tied to their emails as we are. Several days later Nadiya sent a response:

Life here in Ukraine has become incredibly difficult lately. The ongoing war, the constant anxiety, and the worsening security situation have taken a huge emotional and physical toll on me. Right now, I find myself in a place where I need to focus all my energy just on surviving, keeping my family safe, and finding some mental peace.

I want you to know how much our meetings meant to me. In the middle of all this darkness and chaos, our conversations were like a safe haven, a bright window to a peaceful world. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kindness, your patience, your empathy, and for simply being there for me. You weren’t just a language partner; your support was a true light for me during a very dark time.

I will always cherish the memories of our chats. I wish you and your loved ones peace, health, and happiness. Thank you for your warm heart.

With all my gratitude and warmth,

—Nadiya

I told her I completely understood and to let me know if there was anything in my power I could do to help. “Slava Ukraini,” I said. She wrote back once more to thank me again and said she hoped that when peace returns she and her family will be able to welcome me as a visitor to their city.

Nadiya is an inspiration; I intend to work with ENGin further.

In response, perhaps, to everyone from mainstream media to Russian mil bloggers saying the Ukrainians have degraded Russian air defenses to the point they can strike at will deep into Russia, even in Moscow, Putin has launched a vicious new campaign of missile and drone attacks across Ukraine, “the Kremlin hoping to change the narrative of a war mired in battlefield setbacks and diplomatic stalemate amid growing signs of domestic disquiet,” as NBC News put it. President Zelensky has pleaded for more help from the United States.

Home

About

Reaching Out to Connect with a Gallant Voice from a War-Ravaged Land